


Illegible

by bluejbird



Series: Interconnected [1]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Temporary Character Death, F/M, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-27
Updated: 2016-11-27
Packaged: 2018-09-02 14:03:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8670427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluejbird/pseuds/bluejbird
Summary: Leonard's spent a long time thinking about the three initials printed on his chest, and what they stand for. Jim can barely decipher the initials on his body, and he's seen what the pain of losing your soulmate can do to a person. So if he pretends he doesn't have one, then surely the only person he's hurting is himself.Or, the one where Jim and Bones both misunderstand what their soulmarks mean.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Part one of the 'Interconnected' series: Variations on a theme, or seven times Jim and Bones were soulmates, and two times they weren't but decided they didn't care.

A couple of weeks before Leonard’s sixth birthday, he feels a searing pain in his chest. Being the son of a doctor really doesn’t help in this situation because immediately he imagines he’s having a myocardial infarction and wonders whether he should stumble downstairs to find his mother, go into his father’s office and grab a hypospray, or call for an emergency medical transport.

Luckily his sister finds him first, and pries his hands away from where he’s clutching his chest.

“Your soulmark is coming in,” Donna says, when he’s managed to gasp out what’s wrong, tugging the collar of his shirt down so he can see the faint lines forming. It’s too faint to read, but he knows what a soulmark is. Everyone knows.

“It means your soulmate was just born,” she explains, as if he doesn’t understand. The moment your soulmate is born, their initials are inscribed somewhere on your body. Donna was born with ‘FJW’ just above her bellybutton. His mom has his father’s initials on her inner wrist, and, Leonard assumes, his father has his mother’s initials somewhere, although he’s hardly around enough to ask.

It makes Leonard’s fingers tingle, thinking that there’s someone out there, waiting for him. He spends the afternoon staring in the mirror at the pale shapes, trying to figure out what they’ll say. It’s a nice distraction from the nerves of having to start school soon, worrying about how to make friends and be smart enough to earn his father’s approval.

When he finally goes downstairs for dinner, his mother is staring at a holoscreen, looking troubled. There’s been some sort of accident, and when she sees him, she wraps her arms around him and says, “Promise me you’ll never go into space.”

Leonard promises. He has absolutely no desire to head out into the black. He’s already decided he’s going to be a basketball player. Or maybe, if that falls through, he’ll follow in his father’s footsteps.

His father comes home in a mood, so he doesn’t tell anyone about his soulmark, and when Donna opens her mouth he kicks her under the table, even though it means he pays for it later.

As the days go by, he keeps an eye on the soulmark. It stays faint for more than two months, then one morning he wakes up and the lines of the letters are dark and heavy. He traces them with his fingers – JTK. Right over where the left atrium of his heart is. He doesn’t know what it means that it’s only just now appeared, but he’s not going to question it. He spends a long time daydreaming about his soulmate, who they are, where they are. At six years old, he believes in fairytales and romance, even if Donna teases him about it.

He meets Jocelyn for the first time when he’s 18, and she’s 12, and he doesn’t think anything of it. Their mothers are old friends from college, and the family stops by to visit at some point over the summer. Leonard barely pays her any attention, choosing instead to spend his time locked in his room studying. He’s picked a pre-med course, to please his father, and he’s figured out that he can get through it quicker if he takes extra classes in the fall.

Donna comes to fetch him for dinner.

“I think the little pipsqueak downstairs has a crush on you,” she teases, tugging at his shoulder. The engagement ring on her hand, passed down from Fred’s great-grandmother over the holidays, sparkles. Leonard is happy for his sister, pleased they’d found each other so quickly.

It makes Leonard wonder when he’ll meet his soulmate.

Five years later, he walks in the door, home from medical school in need of a much anticipated rest, and Jocelyn is sitting at the kitchen counter.

She doesn’t see him at first, and he takes a moment to look at her. Her blonde hair cascades around her face, almost touching the PADD she’s reading from. It takes him a moment to recognise her as the kid who’d stared at him over dinner half a decade ago. He thinks she looks beautiful, and he’s smiling by the time she looks at him.

Jocelyn blushes. “Leonard!,” she exclaims, jumping up from her chair and almost knocking it over. “I didn’t know you’d be here.”

Leonard drops his bag on the floor and mumbles something about needing a break and wanting to surprise his mom. Jocelyn beams as he talks to her and babbles something back, and it’s all a bit confusing until their conversation draws their mothers from the parlour.

Both of them seem surprised to see him, and they exchange a look.

“What’s going on?” he asks, immediately suspicious, and Jocelyn waits for a nod from her mother before shrugging out of her cardigan and turning around to show him the letters inked across her scapula.

LHM

It doesn’t exactly look like Leonard’s handwriting, but his scribbles are generally illegible anyway.

“Oh,” Leonard says.

Jocelyn pulls her cardigan back on and bites her lip. She walks towards Leonard slowly, then reaches out a hand to place on his chest.

“JTK,” she says, tracing where she thinks the letters are. She’s a little off, but it still makes Leonard shiver. “Jocelyn Theresa Kavanagh.”

The discussion that follows lasts long into the night, and Leonard doesn’t get the rest and relaxation he was hoping for. He goes through stages of disbelief, confusion, and anger towards his mother when he realises how long she’s known about this, how long she and Jocelyn’s mother have been planning.

“I didn’t want to spook you,” his mother says, and Leonard doesn’t know how to respond to that.

Instead he manages to insist that they wait until Jocelyn is 18, and everyone except Jocelyn agrees. Her eyes flash when she argues, and Leonard respects the fire in her, even though she’s ultimately overridden.

He spends the weekend sitting awkwardly with her on the front porch, or teaching her how to ride one of the tame mares from the stable. Jocelyn smiles whenever she looks at him, and it makes him smile back.

The night before he goes back to college, he corners his mother as she’s cleaning up after dinner.

“When you met dad,” he asks, trying for casual and failing, “was it a revelation? Seeing your soulmate for the first time?”

His mother laughs. “Not really. We didn’t get on at first. I thought he was an arrogant ass. He thought I was a bleeding heart. But somewhere along the way, we realised that the soulmarks were right.”

Leonard takes the stack of plates from her arms and puts them away, ponderous. He’d expected fireworks and a marching band when he met his soulmate. But if it wasn’t like that for his parents, then maybe how he felt about Jocelyn – uncomfortable, pleased at the attention, general confusion, admiration for her spunk and beauty – was normal, and it would grow into something more.

They get married the day after Jocelyn’s birthday in March. They last five years, but Jocelyn is too young, with too many ideas about how things should be, and not many about the practicalities of how they really are, and Leonard is too caught up in his work, trying to earn the respect of his father and to prove to himself that he’s something important.

Jocelyn meets someone else. His name is Harry, and later, on some documentation pertaining to the divorce and adoption rights for Joanna, Leonard notices he signs things as L. Harold Martin. He doesn’t know what to do with that – whether it makes it better that he was never Jocelyn’s soulmate after all, or worse, that they’ve wasted five years of each other’s lives with the only thing worth showing a baby girl who’ll never get to know her real father, if Jocelyn’s lawyers have anything to say about it.

Later, there’s a momentary surge of hope that maybe, just maybe, his soulmate is still out there somewhere. But hope is easy to drown at the bottom of a bottle of bourbon, and that’s exactly what Leonard does. By the time he somehow stumbles across Pike and recklessly agrees to sign up with Starfleet, he barely even thinks about the initials over his battered heart.

~~~

James Tiberius Kirk is born with the weight of legacy on his back, a chip on his shoulder, and three scrawled letters on the top of his foot. It’s almost impossible to read, but he doesn’t think anything of it for years. His mother has a clear GK behind her ear, but Sam’s is similarly scribbled, the only distinguishable letter is the first, a large angular A.

Sometimes when he’s bored, Jim squints at it, trying to decipher where each letter starts and stops. They all run into each other, and it’s hard to determine whether the first letter is a C or an L, whether the last letter is an M or maybe an N. He’s pretty sure the middle initial is a H, which is completely unhelpful since people rarely introduce themselves by stating their middle name.

It makes sense in Jim’s young head that if it’s hard for him to find his soulmate, he needs to make it easier for his soulmate to find him, which sparks a habit of introducing himself as James Tiberius Kirk, or occasionally James T. Kirk, carefully enunciated. As he gets older, he watches the expressions of people he meets carefully. There’s plenty of recognition – he’s George Kirk’s son, after all, the baby born in space while his father died – but not the recognition he’s hoping for.

By the time Jim is a teenager and his hormones are running wild, he decides he doesn’t care about soulmarks or soulmates. He admires Sam, in a way, for wanting to wait until he finds his soulmate, but he pities him, too. Jim doesn’t understand the point of people who act like they’re in some kind of limbo until their soulmate comes along. He’s reminded all too often by Frank that he should be grateful to be alive. Frank doesn’t have a soulmark, presumably, Jim thinks but never says out loud, because he doesn’t have a soul. Jim will never be able to understand why his mother married such an asshole. But he’s got one thing right.

Jim is grateful to be alive and he’s not going to waste it pining over someone he’s never met. And later, when his mother breaks all of her promises to come home to visit, and when Sam runs off to some distant colony, he thinks that whoever his soulmate is will probably just let him down and leave him anyway.

So he lives life as if he doesn’t have a soulmark. He never walks around in barefeet after the third time one of his conquests tries to convince him that it’s their initials scrawled on his foot. So he leaves his socks on when he fucks, and if whoever his partner is doesn’t like it, then it’s their loss.

But it’s always at the back of his mind. He still introduces himself by his full name occasionally, just in case. And whenever he feels particularly attracted to someone he asks their full name.

There’s a slim possibility that the last letter inked on his foot could be a U, so he’s pushier than perhaps he should be when he meets Uhura. He wouldn’t mind if she were his soulmate. And he wouldn’t mind if she wasn’t, but wanted to get to know him better.

Mid-fight, as he’s being punched and shoved around the bar, he catches a glimpse as her skirt rides up of three swirling characters high on her outer thigh. It could be just a regular tattoo but Jim recognises the signs of a soulmark, the telltale signs of belonging to the person rather than artificially inked in the skin. It’s not the first time he’s seen one where the language is alien. He doesn’t know what species Uhura’s soulmate is, and he’s too busy getting pummeled in the face and then lectured by Pike to give it much attention, but when he sees her again on the shuttle, he hopes she hasn’t met her soulmate yet. He wouldn’t mind the chance to trace his fingertips over the swirls and loops, and ask her if she knows what it means. He wonders if that’s why her specialty is xenolinguistics, driven by a desire to understand the letters inked on her skin.

He’s distracted thinking about it when he hears a commotion from the bathroom, and before he knows it there’s an irate southerner next to him, grouching about the dangers of space travel. Jim isn’t sure why but he likes the man, for all of his bluster. Maybe because he so readily shares the contents of his flask.

Jim raises it in salute. “Jim Kirk,” he says, not even thinking of announcing his full name. He’s been thinking that maybe he should finally put the idea of soulmarks and soulmates behind him. Afterall, he’s heading to Starfleet Academy to turn over a new leaf.

~~~

Jim is dead. Leonard knows, even before he gets the call. He feels it as a sharp pain in his chest, and he doesn’t have time to stop and look – there are too many other injured crew to deal with, and he has a job to do – but he knows it’s his soulmark.

Leonard is a goddamn professional, so he does everything he should be doing. He heals patients. He checks on his staff.

And then when Scotty comes in with a body bag on a stretcher, he unzips it anyway, because he has to see.

When he looks at Jim, all Leonard sees is a wasted life. A wasted opportunity. His own, not Jim’s.

He looks down at the man he’s called his best friend for almost four years, and remembers when he’d realised he loved Jim. It had been at the academy, where they’d been thrown together time and again. They’d been in the same group at orientation, then in similar classes in their first year due to their accelerated programmes, both non-traditional cadets who didn’t quite fit in. Their friendship had flowed easily, and when Leonard had figured out who Jim was – his initials, his date of birth – he’d begun to suspect that maybe Jim was the JTK printed carefully on his skin.

He’d been too scared to say anything, even when they’d chosen to room together in their second year. He wasn’t proud of his fear, but his failed marriage was still fresh in his mind and it seemed natural to try and avoid hurting himself wherever possible. So he’d kept his shirt on all the time, and somewhere along the way Jim had assumed that Leonard was prudish or ashamed of his body or both, and Leonard had never bothered to correct him.

It had taken all of the courage he’d had to casually bring up the subject of soulmarks one night when they’d been drinking. He’d been curious as to why Jim had never mentioned it, never asked Leonard his middle name, never even hinted that he might suspect they were soulmates. Jim’s answer wasn’t what Leonard had half hoped for and half feared.  

Jim didn’t have a soulmark. He’d said it simply with a shrug as if it wasn’t a big deal, and he’d stared at his sock-clad feet as if they were more interesting than the topic at hand.

There was no reason not to believe him. There were plenty of people born without soulmarks, and sometimes Leonard envied them. How easy it must be to not be constantly waiting for your soulmate to show up, to worry about being worthy of them. To not feel that you owed them something. Not that Jim embodied someone to be envied. He had plenty of demons that Leonard knew about, and surely many that he didn’t. But the lack of a soulmark helped explain how Jim so easily slipped into bed, without a second thought, with anyone who gave him the eye.

“What about yours?” Jim had asked, and Leonard wanted to tell him his suspicions, even if they meant nothing now. It would damn typical of Leonard’s luck for him to find his soulmate, only to learn they didn’t have a soulmark. He wondered if that had happened before, or if he might just the unluckiest bastard in the universe.

“Jocelyn’s initials,” Leonard had said, and it hadn’t been a lie. Jim hadn’t asked any follow up questions, and Leonard hadn’t offered any more answers, and that had been that.

It hadn’t taken long for Leonard to come to the realisation that if Jim was his soulmate, he’d follow him to the ends of the galaxy. If he wasn’t Jim’s soulmate, he was content to be Jim’s friend and, for the most part, that was enough. And there’d still been the possibility that, maybe, the JTK on his chest referred to someone else. That there was a third person out there with those same initials who would shape his life in some profound way, even if it was against the odds.

But Jim is dead, and any lasting doubts about the name behind the initials are gone, replaced instead by pain that is starting to dull to an uncomfortable ache that he doesn’t think will ever go away. It’s hard to tell where the pain of the flesh ends, and where his broken heart begins.

Leonard sinks onto a chair, putting his head in his hands.

And then the tribble burbles, and it’s the most glorious sound he’s ever heard. Because he knows what to do.

He’s going to save Jim, even if he’s not Jim’s soulmate. He’s going to save Jim, and they’ll grow old together. The universe might see him as some cosmic joke, but if he’s the unluckiest man in the universe, he’s also the most stubborn. He’s fought off so many dangerous and deadly things, why not death itself?  

Leonard snaps straight into full-on CMO mode. He barks for a cryotube. He yells for Spock.

There’s no time, but everyone follows his orders. One of the nurses strips Jim down, ready to go into the cryotube.

He almost misses it. There’s so much activity, so many thoughts running through his head, so many things that have to be done immediately if he’s going to have a chance. But Jim’s skin is so pale in death that the dark scrawl jumps out and practically slaps him in the face.

Three initials on the top of his left foot.

LHM.

Leonard’s heart seems to stop for a moment as he stares. He knows those initials. He knows that writing.

“Damn you, Jim,” he mutters, the pain in his chest paling compared to the fury and frustration that curls in the pit of his stomach. Jim had lied. Jim had _known_.

Now he has to save him, if only to take him by the shoulders and shake him afterwards.

He pulls his gaze away from the stark letters. It takes one of the nurses saying his name three times before he snaps out of it, and orders her to put Jim in the tube.

As he moves away, he sees Carol Marcus looking at Jim’s foot, too. She’s off of her biobed, osteoregenerator still humming away. Her face is carefully blank as she stares for a moment, and then she’s moving, helping Leonard seal the tube as best she can with the brace on her leg hampering her movements.

Everything else is a blur of activity. It reaches a point where Leonard is running on fumes of the stims he’s shot into his veins, and Spock and Carol and Scotty and half of his staff are trying to get him to rest, but he can’t. He has to get the serum right. He has to bring Jim back.

He doesn’t know what he’d do without him. It’s the sort of empty sounding sentence he’s heard from so many people in his life when they’ve lost someone. He remembers his mother saying it when his father had died, and amidst his own grief he’d thought that the words were meaningless. She’d get up, go about her day, live, because what other choice was there? But now that the words are his, he finally understands what people mean. He’s here in space because of Jim. He’s alive because of Jim, time and time again. Every future he’s imagined revolves around Jim. And he isn’t ready to lose the promise of those futures.

Part of his brain is coming up with some very choice words to say to Jim, ideally to be interspersed with some angry kisses, and preferably some promises not to lie to him – or die on him – again. It’s a good enough distraction for the grieving, aching part of him to let the medical part of his brain take control.

Finally, he sets up the transfusion. Nothing happens for a very long time, and everyone is standing around looking grim.

Leonard feels it, before the monitors detect anything. He feels the pain in his chest, the pain that’s been gradually receding, flare up. It brings him right back to being six years old and imagining a cardiac event, and it’s the most wonderful, the most gloriously welcome feeling.

He lets out a sigh of relief that only Spock notices, and then the monitor kicks in and there are brain waves, and then a heartbeat, and then one by one the other vital signs show up.

Jim is alive.

And when he wakes up, Leonard is going to kill him for lying about his soulmark and stealing the last four years of their lives.

~~~

Everyone keeps asking Jim what it was like to be dead, and he doesn’t have an answer. There was pain, and there was relief and satisfaction that he’d saved the crew. And then there was darkness. Nothingness. A void bigger than the space he loves to explore.

And then there was noise and light and pain again.

It takes him awhile to remember everything that had happened before he died. Bits of his memory are missing, and they fill in frustratingly slowly.

The crew helps. They all visit him. Bones stays by his side as much as he can, but every so often he gets pulled away into meetings. The others take turns sitting by him. Spock, of course, sometimes with Uhura, his hand resting on her thigh close to where his name is inscribed. Jim’s wondered for awhile where Uhura’s initials are written on Spock, but he’s never been brave enough to ask. Scotty visits too, full of exaggerated stories about just how damaged the ship is and how long the rebuild is going to take. Chekov and Sulu stop by together, telling wild tales that make him laugh enough that his ribs ache afterwards, and Bones yells at them when he shows up to kick them out.

And Carol. Carol visits too.

Jim doesn’t know her as well as the others. He doesn’t know her as well as he’d like. Jim has always appreciated a pretty face, and hers is the prettiest he’s seen in a long time.

At first they don’t say much to each other. What can you say to someone who watched a parent die in such a brutal way? A parent whose actions led, in the end, to the deaths of so many. But the silence isn’t as awkward as it could be.

Eventually, Carol talks about her work, standing by the window of his hospital room and gazing out. As she talks, Jim’s eyes rove down her body. He thinks about her, half naked in the shuttle. He’s thought about it a lot, since he woke up.

There are just two letters inked on Carol’s skin. Right above her left hipbone. J.K.

No one ever said that the soulmarks had to be full initials, after all. So there’s a chance that it could be him. Jim’s certainly attracted to her, which is always a good start.

He thinks about the scrawl on his foot. The first letter could definitely be a C. The last letter, almost certainly an M. The middle letter–

“What’s your middle name?” he blurts, interrupting her.

Carol blinks at him, but is somehow not surprised by the question. She walks to the foot of his bed, and rests her hand over the toes of his left foot.

“Helena,” she says quietly.

Jim licks his lips. He wonders when she’d seen his soulmark, how she knew, and because it seems easiest, he just asks.

“Before we put you in the cryotube,” she explains. “They had to strip you – clothing would have added a small, but crucial delay that they couldn’t risk. I only caught a glimpse, but…”

She lifts the sheet, and they look at his soulmark together. The writing surprises Jim – he expects her to have clear, neat printing, as crisp as her accent. But he watches as she traces the letters, exaggerates them to make each clear as she scratches with the tip of her nail – C.H. M.

“I didn’t think it’d be you,” she says, and Jim doesn’t have a reply.

The door opens then, and Bones is in the doorway.

“Jim I need to–”

Whatever he’s about to say dies on his lips as he stares at Carol. Stares at where her fingers are still tracing the letters on Jim’s foot.

Carol steps away, dropping the sheet back in place.

“Sorry,” Bones says, but doesn’t sound it. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.” Instead of leaving, he moves to one of the monitors and presses some buttons. The machine hums, too loud for easy conversation.

“I should go,” Carol says, and Jim shoots her an apologetic look, frowning at Bones, who pointedly ignores him.

She hovers by the bed for a moment, as if she’s unsure what to do. So Jim makes it easy. He reaches his hand up to her, and when she leans in, he cups the back of her head, pulling her down.

Her hair tickles his cheeks as he kisses her, and he feels her smile against his lips.

“I’ll come back and see you tomorrow,” she says when she pulls away, casting a glance at Bones, as if asking permission.

“That’s fine,” Bones says, clipped and icy in a way that makes Jim stare at him in surprise. Bones is blustery and grumpy, but never cold. Not like this.

Carol squeezes Jim’s hand before slipping away. There’s silence in the room for a long moment, then Jim clears his throat.

“What did you need?” he asks, and Bones’s head snaps up.

“What are you talking about?”

Jim leans back on his pillows, frowning. “When you came in. You said you needed to do something.”

“Oh,” Bones says, waving a dismissive hand. “I was just, uh, wanting to run some more tests. We should be able to get you out of here soon.”

Jim nods, and as the tests are being run he asks Bones about his day. Bones is oddly cagey, and Jim doesn’t understand why.

Before he leaves though, Bones stops and stares at him for awhile.

“I thought you said you didn’t have a soulmark,” he says. There’s an odd hint of accusation in his tone that Jim doesn’t understand.

“I didn’t really believe in soulmates,” Jim tries to explain. “I didn’t really want one.”

“But you do now.”

Bones’s voice sounds flat, and it makes Jim squirm but he doesn’t know why.

“Did you ever wonder who it was? Try to figure it out?”

Jim shakes his head. “I guess you’ve seen it. Trying to figure out the letters gave me a headache. I never would have guessed it was Carol, but I suppose it makes sense.”

“Sure,” Bones says dully, and then makes an excuse and leaves.

Jim watches him go, wondering why he feels so exhausted all of a sudden.

The next day, Bones is back to normal, and Jim almost thinks he dreamt the whole thing, except that Carol comes to see him again. This time, when they’re alone, she lifts up her shirt to show him the letters he remembers from the shuttle.

Close up, they look thick and even, and not particularly like Jim’s writing. He wonders why the T is missing, and what that means.

It occurs to him that maybe it’s all coincidence, that they’re not really soulmates, but his heart swells when she smiles at him, and he wonders if that’s what love feels like. Jim isn’t sure he’s ever really been in love, and he’s hardly had good role models in his life. A mother who yearned for her dead soulmate, and fell into a loveless marriage with an asshole just because he was there and she wanted an excuse to run back to the stars. A best friend whose soulmate cheated and took away his child. A first officer who represses his emotion to the point where Jim wonders how he and Uhura would have found each other if it weren’t for the soulmark on her thigh bearing his name.

Jim thinks that love should be not wanting to be without someone. Trusting someone implicitly, through good times and bad. Knowing they trust and believe in you. For him, that’s his crew, especially Spock, and even more especially Bones. He can’t imagine life without any of them, and it hurts when he thinks about it too hard. It’s why he’d sacrificed himself, in the hope that he’d save them and they’d carry on without him. He doesn’t know how he’d carry on without them.

He doesn’t trust Carol yet. Doesn’t know her that well. But he thinks he can learn to trust her, and maybe that’s where the love will come from.

Later that night, when he’s finally discharged from hospital, Carol takes him back to her apartment, and he traces the letters on her hip with his tongue and wonders if what he can taste is the beginnings of love.

~~~

Leonard is nothing if not a man of his word. He’d vowed to himself a long time ago, no matter what, that he’d stick beside Jim. That he’d follow his soulmate, no matter that he wasn’t Jim’s.

The fact that Jim has chosen to interpret his soulmark as someone else’s initials changes nothing.  

It hurts. God, does it hurt. When he closes his eyes he can see the letters, clear as day. LHM. How Jim can see Carol in them, how Carol can see herself in them, he doesn’t know. The only explanation is that Jim doesn’t think Leonard can be his soulmate. That it hasn’t even occurred to  him, or perhaps worse, that it has occurred to him and he’s dismissed it as ridiculous or unwanted.

It hurts every time he sees them together. Jim moves straight from the hospital to Carol’s, not even bothering to step foot back in his apartment other than to fetch a box or two of clothes and books. Leonard helps, of course, because he’s Jim’s best friend, and also a sadistic idiot who apparently likes to torture himself.

Carol makes dinner, and it’s terrible, and they laugh and drink wine and when Leonard watches two blonde heads dip together, he sees the future stretching out in front of them. A future where they head back out on the Enterprise. A future where they have amazing adventures, and explore the universe, and eventually, return to Earth, where Jim and Carol grow old together and maybe have a family – a son, he thinks, with eyes just like his father’s – and they invite Leonard over for dinner and games and family celebrations. A future where maybe Joanna grows up and seeks him out, wants to get to know him. Hell, maybe a future where his daughter and Jim’s imaginary son fall in love and have babies, and they can be crotchety grandparents together.

There are worse futures he could have, like any future without Jim in it. He’d discovered that in the instant his soulmark had burned as Jim died, when a lifetime without Jim became a terrifying possibility. And yes, he wanted more. He wanted to be able to hold Jim, to kiss him, to make love to him. To wake up with him each morning and go to sleep with him each night, and to feel as loved back in return as he feels about Jim right now.

But something is better than nothing, and it’s better than he expects. It’s better than he deserves.

So he smiles and pretends he’s not jealous of Carol, and neither she nor Jim seem to notice. And if Spock or Uhura or any of the senior staff of the Enterprise or his amazing medical team notice, no one says a word. And as the months roll on, it becomes easier, until he can almost forget the letters on Jim’s foot, can almost pretend he doesn’t dream of Jim waking him in the night to kiss him and tell him he’s sorry and that he understands now.

It helps that he’s kept plenty occupied. Once the chaos and carnage left behind by John Harrison, or Khan, or whoever the hell he was, is cleared away, the official meetings start. They have meetings about every decision Jim and the bridge crew made. They have meetings about what happened on Qo’nos. They have meetings about Admiral Marcus, and meetings about the Defiant. They have meetings about fucking meetings, and Leonard grows so tired of sitting or standing at attention and saying “Yes sir” and “No ma’am” that even seeing his starched dress uniform hanging in his closet makes his back stiffen and his cheeks ache from having to bite his tongue so often.

He also knows there’s worse to come. After several meetings, there is a hearing, where he bluffs and lies and says he doesn’t know exactly how the serum worked. Spock, surprisingly, helps by offering plausible but untruthful opinions on why Starfleet’s attempts to recreate the serum have not been successful. The truth of the matter is that Leonard doesn’t want them to know what he did, and also he doesn’t quite understand it himself. He’d needed the serum to work, and it did, and even as a scientist, he didn’t want to question too hard. He’s worried that it was dumb luck, something he won’t be able to replicate again, should Jim get into another such predicament. With Jim, it’s fairly reasonable to assume that they’ll barely be back in space before he’s risking his life all over again.

And he’s worried that there’s something more to it. That maybe the only reason it worked is because Jim’s his soulmate. Not that he can tell anyone that, because dammit, he’s a doctor, not a mystic. It’s a whole lot of hocus pocus bullshit, if you ask him, but still. It’s a possibility that he doesn’t want to examine too closely. Or let anyone know about, in case they ask awkward questions with answers Leonard doesn’t want Jim to overhear.

In the end, Starfleet admits defeat on the whole matter, and Leonard gets a dressing down and a six-month suspension of his medical license.

When the hearing is adjourned, Jim is waiting for him with lips draw into a thin, anxious line.

“I’m so sorry, Bones,” he says, and pulls Leonard into a tight hug. Jim’s face is in Leonard’s neck, and he can feel Jim’s lips against his skin, moving as he says sorry over and over. Their chests press tightly together, and Leonard’s heart clenches, wondering if Jim would have done the same thing in some other universe where he was brave enough to tell Jim the truth. He wonders if Jim would have pressed his hands and mouth over the letters. If they’d both have been content.  

When Jim releases him, Leonard claps a hand on Jim’s shoulder, all gruff and brotherly.

“Nothin’ to say sorry for,” he says, and means it. “It’s a small price to pay.”

Jim looks at him and says nothing, and Leonard looks back. Then Jim cracks a grin and offers to buy him a drink, and they share a pleasant evening together, just the two of them. Just like old times, back in the academy.

Then Jim goes home to Carol, and Leonard goes home to pack.

He takes the first shuttle home to Georgia. He doesn’t exactly have permission to go, but a quick comm to Spock smoothes things out, and he’s excused from meetings for the meantime, with clear instructions that he’s on call and may be beamed back with only a moment’s notice if he’s needed. Leonard hates the transporter, but agrees anyway, and goes home to the family farm.

His mother is pleased to see him, and sits him at the kitchen counter, in the same spot where he’d seen Jocelyn all those years ago. It feels like a lifetime, like it happened to a different person, and perhaps that’s true. Leonard isn’t the boy desperate for his father’s approval, nor the medical student desperate to prove his worth, nor the young man desperate to make his marriage work, nor the broken man so desperate to escape that he flees to someplace that terrifies him. He doesn’t know who he is now, and is surprised to find it doesn’t bother him.

He eats everything his mother puts in front of him, and when she goes to bed he takes a flashlight out to the family plot and sits in front of his father’s headstone. No one gets buried anymore – land is too great a commodity – but as he traces the letters and numbers with his eyes and then his fingers, he thinks he can feel David’s presence.

“At least I saved one man who I loved, that never loved me back,” Leonard says out loud into the darkness, answered only by the chirp of crickets. Then he feels like an asshole, like the worst son on the planet. He lets himself think of his father dying in slow agony while he’d watched helplessly, because it’s a nice change from the pain he’s been pushing down for the past few months. He wishes he could go back and save his father – recreate the serum and bring him back to life as easily as he’d done for Jim. It had been agony, learning about the cure so soon afterwards, and then having to tell his mother, and his sister.

Leonard doesn’t think either of them blame him. They’d seen David’s pain just as he had. Had heard him beg for release. They’d stood by him as he’d broken every oath he’d made, except for the one to look after his family. But it doesn’t mean he’s ever stopped blaming himself.

He wonders if his father would be proud of him now, for all that he’d accomplished. Going into space to avoid his problems, but somehow managing to help save himself, and the world.

He touches the headstone again, and feels calm. When he gets back to the house, he puts aside the bottle of bourbon he’d been planning to drink, and goes to sleep without it.

In the morning, he gets a comm from Jocelyn. It’s unexpected and at first he panics, thinking something’s happened to Joanna.

It turns out that Jocelyn wants him to visit. Wants him to see his daughter. She doesn’t say why, but she asks enough questions to make it clear that she’s proud of him for what he’s done in Starfleet.

He doesn’t question. He showers and shaves and puts on fresh clothes and turns up at exactly the time specified.

Joanna is shy at first. He talks with Jocelyn and Harry, who it turns out isn’t as big an asshole as Leonard had always assumed. He’s looked after Jo as if she were his own, which is more than Leonard could have hoped for. Leonard learns that they’ve shown Jo holos and photographs and told her things about him. It makes it easier to pick up a relationship.

They work out a schedule. He can come and visit a couple times a week, and Joanna can visit the McCoy farm each weekend, to get to know her father and her grandmother and the place where Leonard grew up.

Jocelyn walks him to the door, and without thinking he hugs her tightly.

“Thank you,” he says into her golden hair, and her shoulders start to shake. When he pulls away her cheeks are wet and her eyes red.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and he echoes her words, meaning them. He studies her face, surprised at how much older she looks, but how much better as well. She’s no longer an infatuated teenager, or frustrated young woman.

As the weeks pass, Leonard gets to know his daughter, but also Jocelyn too. It makes him wonder if he ever really knew her, or she him. Five years of marriage, and they were strangers. Five weeks of visits, and they’re almost friends.

Eventually, he asks a question that makes Jocelyn smile sadly.

“It hasn’t come in yet,” she says. “We’ve explained what they are, and that she should tell us when she gets one. But nothing yet.”

“Maybe her soulmate hasn’t been born,” Leonard says, thinking about his imagined future, and Jim and Carol’s son. He thinks about how his own chest had burned the day Jim was born.

“Or maybe she doesn’t have one,” Jocelyn replies. “Maybe she doesn’t need one. Maybe she’ll make her own destiny and not follow a few black lines that make a shitty map.”

It makes Leonard chuckle, and he can’t disagree. He’d once thought it the worst fate in the world, to not have a soulmark, something he’d almost pitied Jim for.

Leonard wonders if his face changes when he thinks of Jim, because Jocelyn’s gaze turns soft.

“What about you,” she asks, reaching out to press her hand over his heart. “Have you found them yet?”

Leonard doesn’t know how to respond. So he shrugs and says, “It’s complicated.”

“It always is with you,” she says, and doesn’t pry any further.

Leonard gets the comm early on a Tuesday morning, to say he’s being recalled back to Starfleet Medical immediately. He’s out in the paddocks helping the farmhands fix one of the fences, and doesn’t have time to change before he’s beamed back to San Francisco.

Jim is waiting for him in the transport room, and laughs when he sees Leonard’s checked shirt and workboots.

“Why, howdy partner,” Jim drawls in the worst southern accent Leonard has ever heard. He laughs though, and throws his arms around Jim in greeting.

He’s missed his friend. They comm regularly, and write to each other, just like Leonard does with most of the senior crew. But it’s not the same. He’s told Jim all about life back home, about Jo and Jocelyn and how he and Harry have even played poker a few times on some weird journey towards mutual respect. And Jim has told him about the boring meetings and ship repairs and the weather on the coast.

“It looks like life’s been treating you well,” Jim says, throwing his arm around Leonard’s shoulders.

Leonard wants to say the same for Jim, but he looks tired and drawn around the eyes and mouth.

“I can’t complain,” he just says. He wonders what he looks like through Jim’s eyes. He knows that the man he sees in the mirror has straighter posture, browner skin and, dare he say it, is happier than he’s been in a long while. “So what am I back for? More Admirals lecturing us on things we should have done differently? Or is it to pick out the colour of the walls in my new quarters?”

Jim drops his arm and gives Leonard an odd look.

“Are you shitting me?” he asks, incredulously. “I expected you to be crossing off the days on a calendar. Your suspension is over,” he adds, seeing Leonard’s still mystified look.

Leonard stares at him for a moment. He thinks about the past months, about spending time with family and working on the farm, about seeing the seasons change, and seeing Jo grow a couple of inches. Of listening to Scotty talk about ship repairs that he knows take considerable time.

He’s always found time to go slowly, out in space. But back on Earth the time has gone fast. Too fast. Six months feels more like six weeks, and he can’t help but mourn a little that he’ll have to say goodbye to Earth and head back into the black behind Jim’s left shoulder. It’s where he belongs, but he’ll miss the life he’s built here, too.

“Great,” he says, trying to muster up more enthusiasm. He follows Jim down the corridor, trusting that Jim knows where he’s going. “So,” he says to fill the silence. “What’s new?”

“Scotty has the nacelles working,” Jim says. “Sulu is dating this really nice guy who specialises in botany. Spock and Uhura have gone to visit New Vulcan. Oh, and Carol and I broke up.”

Leonard stops dead in his tracks. “When did that happen?” He tries to keep his voice even, only mildly curious. The way a friend with no vested interest would sound.

Jim stops but doesn’t turn around. He shrugs. “A couple months back?” he says, like he’s not entirely sure.

“Oh.” Leonard doesn’t know what else to say. “I’m sure you’ll work it out.”

“Yeah, I don’t think so,” Jim says, and shoves his hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched.

Leonard wants to reach out, to rest his hand on Jim’s shoulder. But he doesn’t move.

“We should go. You don’t want to be late, _Doctor McCoy_.” There’s forced amusement in Jim’s voice, but when he turns around, there’s a genuine smile on his face. Leonard thinks that maybe Jim missed him more than he let show. That maybe he’s glad to be getting his CMO back.

“Sure,” Leonard says, squaring his shoulders, and trying not to think about what Carol and Jim breaking up means. “Let’s go and get this lecture over with.”

It turns out the only lecture he gets is for showing up out of uniform. He’s forgotten enough protocol that he doesn’t even think about snapping back that he’d be in uniform if they’d given him more than a minute warning before they beamed him back. He can feel Jim stiffen beside him, but the Admiral looks almost amused, before she schools her emotions into blandness again and hands Leonard a PADD and a stack of paper. He signs the PADD with his thumb, then takes the offered pen and signs the bottom with a flourish.

“You need to initial here, here, and here,” the Admiral’s assistant says, sounding bored, as if they revoke and reinstate medical licenses all the time. Which, being Starfleet, and the shit people deal with out in space, might very well be the case.

Leonard rolls his eyes and initials where he’s told to. By the time he reaches the third one, Jim is crowding close beside him.

“LHM,” Jim reads, deciphering Leonard’s terrible writing. It’s a doctor stereotype that holds true, in Leonard’s opinion. Even his father had terrible writing, and the handwritten journals that still sit in his office are illegible to everyone, but kept for sentimental reasons. He’s about to say as much to Jim, when realisation hits.

Shit.

“Well, thank you,” Leonard says, handing the stack of papers back. “Appreciate the reinstatement. Won’t fuck up again. Uh, excuse me,” he adds, both for the language, and for permission to leave the room. And then he hurries out.

He barely makes it halfway down the corridor before Jim catches up and grabs him by the elbow.

“Your initials,” Jim hisses in Leonard’s ear. They’re still walking, but Leonard feels more like he’s being marched to an execution. “Your initials are on my fucking foot.”

“Are they?” Leonard asks, trying to sound innocent, like he doesn’t know what Jim’s talking about. “I thought you had Carol’s initials on your foot.”

“No,” Jim says, stopping and pushing Leonard back against the wall. He looks livid, angrier than Leonard’s ever seen him before, and that’s saying something, considering all of the bullies – local and intergalactical – they’ve come across over the years, all of the no-win scenarios they’ve had to face, all of the brutal losses they’ve experienced. “No, they’re your initials in your atrocious handwriting – seriously Bones, didn’t they teach you how to write when you were a kid?”

“Your writing gets messy when you don’t do it very often,” Leonard protests weakly. “I mean–”

Jim’s eyes widen as he stares. “You knew,” he accuses. “You knew they were your initials. And you didn’t say anything. You let me believe that Carol– that I– fuck!”

He looks like he’s going to punch the wall beside Leonard’s head and Leonard flinches automatically. But Jim lowers his fist and half turns away.

“How long?”

“Jim, I–”

“ _How long_?”

“Since you died,” Leonard says. “Probably the same time Carol saw it.”

Jim nods slowly, as if to himself. “Your soulmark,” he says. “What does it say? What are the initials?”

Leonard swallows hard before replying. “JTK.”

Jim goes very still, and doesn’t say anything for an awful, painful moment that stretches on.

“Jim,” Leonard says, reaching out a hand, that Jim ignores.

“Then you’ve known a lot longer than that,” he says. “You’ve known since, what, you met me?”

“I didn’t know it was you,” Leonard argues. Anger flares in him. “You told me you didn’t have one, remember? So best case scenario it wasn’t you, it was someone else. Worse case scenario it was you, but you didn’t feel the same way about me.”

“And how do you feel about me?”

Leonard shakes his head. “Don’t ask me that. It’s not fair.”

Jim makes a pained expression, and grabs Leonard’s wrist hard enough to hurt. “Where is it? I need you to show it to me.”

There’s something frantic about him as he pushes up the sleeve of Leonard’s shirt, searching for letters on the now tanned skin.

“It’s not there, Jim,” Leonard says, shaking him off. “You know it’s not there. You’d have seen it if it was.”

“Then where?”

Leonard looks back and forth down the corridor, then shakes his head. “Not here,” he says, resigned and terrified. “It has to be somewhere private.”

Jim nods his head sharply, not bothering to argue, and stalks away.

Leonard hesitates for just a moment, then follows, wondering what the fallout is going to be, and desperately hoping for the best.

~~~

Jim takes them straight to his old apartment. It says something about his relationship with Carol, he thinks, that he never gave it up. He’d never truly moved in with her, never felt truly at home.

On the short journey there, he tries not to think about Bones beside him, about where on his body he’ll find his own initials, about the fact that his soulmate has been right there beside him for four fucking years and he never knew.

Instead he thinks back to the last time with Carol, sitting in front of the fire in her apartment at opposite ends of the couch. He’d been reading reports, again. She’d been working on some research.

“You know,” she’d said, putting her PADD aside and pointing at Jim’s bare feet, resting on the coffee table. “From here, it doesn’t look like a C at all.”

He’d wanted to be angry. It was a shitty way to end things. But in reality he was relieved. He’d tried to make it work – they both had. But they were too broken in too similar of ways, and they’d never properly fit together. They made each other smile, they respected each other, and by the end, even trusted each other. But there was no love. Just some futile hope that they were meant to be, and that it should be easy, when it wasn’t.

Carol’s name is still on the crew list for the five year mission they’re about to announce, and Jim hopes she’ll stay. She’s family, even if it isn’t in the way he’d thought she would be.

Inside the apartment, Jim gives Bones enough time to wander over to the shelves and pick up a book, stalling.

“Show me.” He wants it to sound like an order, like something Bones can’t refuse. Instead it sounds like he’s begging.

Bones sighs, hesitant. “Jim,” he says. “I don’t know what–”

“Show me,” Jim says again, and this time he lets all the longing into his voice. The need. The part of him that was always there, always waiting for his soulmate. The part he stamped down and denied. The part he tried to fool with Carol, even though he’d known from the beginning it was wrong.

Bones licks his lips and nods. Jim watches his hands fly up to undo his shirt buttons. He does them slowly, and it’s killing Jim, impatience twisting inside him. He wants to stride across the room and help, to pop the buttons off and tug the shirt from Bones’s shoulders. But he’s scared if he does that Bones will turn away and refuse to let him see.

Eventually the shirt hangs open and Bones shrugs it off. For a moment Jim thinks he’s going to fold it neatly, and he has to suppress the frustrated growl that threatens to leap from his mouth. But Bones just drops it onto the ground. He’s left standing in jeans and a white singlet, and as Jim watches, Bones lifts his hands to the collar, then stops. He frowns to himself, as if waging some internal war, then his hands glide down to his hips.

He grasps the hem of his shirt and lifts it up in one fluid motion over his head. It falls on top of the checked shirt.

Jim stares. He stares at the lean lines of abdomen, of the swell of pecs and biceps, at the brown skin dotted with freckles. But mostly he stares at three neat, dark letters. He can see them from across the room, etched over Bones’s heart. JTK.

James Tiberius Kirk. He recognises his handwriting. Neat and unfussy, carefully formed.

“Oh, Bones,” Jim says, but it comes out strangled and painful.

Bones’s lips are downturned, and Jim aches for him. He imagines Bones suspecting for so long, imagines him knowing for these past months, not saying a word, watching him be with Carol.

He could think that Bones doesn’t want him, that it’s the most logical explanation, but he knows Bones, knows how he denies himself happiness, knows how he assumes he’s not wanted. Jim knows that because he recognises it in himself, and fuck the situations that made them who they are, but thank whatever fate or destiny threw them together.

And there’s no way he can think Bones doesn’t want him. Not with the look Bones is giving him. It’s full of pain and hope and heartache and love.

Jim covers the distance in a handful of strides, stopping right in front of him. His hand shakes as he reaches out. When his fingertips dust over the letters, he hears Bones’s sharp intake of breath, sees the shudder that runs through him.

“I’m such an idiot,” Jim murmurs to himself. Then he fixes his gaze on Bones. “You’re such an idiot,” he says accusingly. Bones doesn’t argue. “We’re such fucking idiots,” he adds.

He presses his palm over his initials, and with the other hand reaches out to cup the back of Bones’s head. He pulls Bones closer until their foreheads are pressed together and they’re sharing breath.

Jim closes his eyes. He thinks of seeing Bones for the first time. He thinks of sitting together in classes at the academy, knees and shoulders brushing. He thinks of lying awake at night in their dorm and listening to Bones breathe, grateful that Bones was there and that he was safe. He thinks of Bones rolling his eyes but patching Jim up time and time again. He thinks of Bones standing beside him at the Kobayashi Maru hearing, about him sneaking Jim on board the Enterprise. He thinks of Bones putting his trust in him as he settled into the Captain's’ chair for the first time. He thinks of Bones following him back into space, standing beside him. He thinks of laughing with Bones in a bar, of sitting with Bones overlooking the ocean on some distant planet, of walking into a room and immediately seeking Bones out before anyone else.

He thinks that maybe he’s known what love is this whole time but has just been too stupid to recognise it. And he thinks that he doesn’t need a soulmark to recognise that Bones is his soulmate. But it’s nice to have the reminder anyway.

“Bones,” Jim whispers. He pulls back enough that he can open his eyes and take in Bones’s face without seeing double.

Bones’s eyelids tremble then fly open to meet Jim’s gaze.

“Jim,” Bones breathes out.

“I’m going to kiss you now,” Jim says, hesitating just enough that if Bones doesn’t want this, if he gives even the smallest sign, Jim’ll back off. He’ll pretend, like Bones has done all this time, that there’s nothing between them.

But Bones smiles.

“Finally,” he says, and meets Jim halfway.

~~~

The Enterprise leaves Earth on its five year mission two months later. It’s hard to go, after all this time, but Leonard has a stack of holos to watch when he misses it. Of his mother baking peach pie in the kitchen, and of Jim eating so much that he’s almost sick. Of Joanna running around outside while Jocelyn and Harry and Jim look on, talking quietly amongst themselves. Of Jim in his apartment in San Francisco, stretched out along the couch with his feet pillowed in Leonard’s lap, the scribble of Leonard’s initials dark against his skin, as he laughs and waves the camera away.

They don’t move in together, simply because their assigned rooms turn out to be right beside each other anyway – Spock’s doing, Leonard suspects – and they’re both set in their ways enough that it’s nice to have extra space. Instead, they unlock the connecting door between their rooms and come and go as they please. Mostly, it works for them.

It takes time, of course, to rebuild the trust from the misunderstandings and lies and repressed feelings, but they work towards it together.

Carol is on board the ship, at least for now. She’s made noises about going out to one of the space stations and working there. It’s awkward at first when Leonard runs into her, and he doesn’t know what to say.

Eventually she comes and finds him.

“Doctor McCoy,” she says, standing in front of his desk. “Leonard. I–” she pauses and frowns before continuing. “I want you to know that I’m sorry.”

Leonard doesn’t ask her what she’s sorry for, and she gives him a grateful look.

“I just wanted to say that I’m happy for Jim. And I’m glad– I’m glad it was you.”

“Me too,” Leonard says, and it surprises a laugh from her.

“You two deserve each other,” she says, and it’s said fondly, without a hint of sarcasm or remorse.

She presses a kiss to Leonard’s cheek before she leaves, and he lifts his hand to touch the spot long after she’s gone.

He thinks that she’s right. They do deserve each other. It’s good to go from feeling like you don’t deserve anything, that you should take whatever you can get, to truly feeling like you deserve the most amazing thing in the galaxy.

Leonard is smiling when he bends his head back to his task. He has plenty of work to finish, and Jim will be at his door at the end of the shift, to walk him back to their rooms.


End file.
